Construction bots: storage upgrades and multiple builds per trip

[Deadlock989]

robot-storage.png (51.45 KiB) Viewed 756 times

That's what the research description says ... but regardless, constructor bots only ever ferry one item at a time to one ghost, then they go and fetch one more.

It wouldn't be an issue really, if it weren't for laying concrete. Tiles are square. Area is squared distance. It takes one bot one trip to place one tile. It takes the same bot four trips to lay a 2x2 section of tiles. 3x3, nine. It takes that bot about a billion of your Earth rotations to lay a 50x50 square of tiles. You can throw more bots at it, but that's linear, it's always going to lose versus exponential. Meanwhile the player can whop down a massive square of concrete in the blink of an eye. (To the extent where it's annoyingly easy to spam huge amounts of tiles in the wrong place.)

So make it less linear. I realise there are algorithm challenges here, but let construction bots pick up the same number of items as their logistics brethren, and do more than one build per trip.

Failing that, make a special case for ground tiles. Have bots able to place a 3x3 or 5x5 or 7x7 square of tiles at once, depending on the state of cargo size research.

That way, I might have my car park finished before armaggedon comes.

[eradicator]

After making this system it has made me think if I could apply some variant of it to robots building things, so a robot could theoretically grab 3 inserters and build all 3 quickly in series. It's an interesting thought for another time...

[ssilk]

There is a mod:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Cursed-BCR

BUT: I tried it out for some weeks and it seems to bring Factorio to freeze. (Current with V 0.0.2) See https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Cursed-BC ... 000b310315

[Deadlock989]

There is a mod:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Cursed-BCR

BUT: I tried it out for some weeks and it seems to bring Factorio to freeze. (Current with V 0.0.2) See https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Cursed-BC ... 000b310315

I mean, that's a good attempt, but this sort of thing is always going to be flaky with scripting. Extra items aren't actually carried by the bots, they are magically teleported from some random distant logistic storage at the moment of building. Doesn't seem to check whether adjacent builds are already currently being supplied by some other bot, wasting that other bot's time - in real construction, bots know not to try and supply something another bot is already scheduled to build. Needs to be in the engine, really.

[Qon]

This would really help construction bots do their job and it would look cool too, would really fit the game. I really want con bots to finally take advantage of the bonuses I have researched for them!

I have tried the mod and it's impressive what the modder achieved, but the mod is useless for actually increasing building speed. I uninstalled it to increase UPS and actually vanilla bots build faster because the modded bots freeze and do nothing when the mod is calculating how to place and retrieve items. However, this would use less UPS than what it currently does in vanilla if implemented in the engine since stack size increase costs nothing and reduces bots needed and trips needed (since they don't need to return to chest between placements).